Monday, 17 January 2011

A website has been launched to allow residents to scrutinise how the council spends their money. By clicking here you can get an overview of how much of your cash has gone where and you can even drill down into specifics by clicking on the links. The website is called "spotlight on spend".

There's some interesting stuff in there, such as the apparently large soft furnishings bill, and some notable absences - such as any reference to "communications" - accounting for the large press team and of course the soon to be defunct "H&F News" propaganda paper - but for the time being I think the Council does deserve a lot of credit for putting what they have put there in the first place.

H&F is one of the first authorities to have put this sort of information out into the public domain and has ended up embarrassing neighbouring authorities who have been slow to deliver the same level of accountability - such as Ealing. Whatever arguments we might have about how the money has been spent, at least we can now see a lot of it in order to reach those judgements. So on this, well done Council.